The Discovery That Changed How We Think About Cancer
In a recent interview that's reshaping our understanding of biology, Dr. Michael Levin, a computer scientist and biologist at Tufts University, described cancer in a way that stopped me cold:
"Cancer is a dissociative identity disorder of the body instead of the mind."
Levin's research demonstrates that cancer doesn't begin with a cell "going bad." It begins when a cell disconnects from the electrical network that connects it to its neighbors. When that happens, the cell's "cognitive boundary" shrinks back to its ancient, unicellular self. The rest of the body becomes "just environment," something to exploit rather than something to belong to.
And here's the critical insight: It only takes two cells to start forming cancer.
Two cells. Disconnected from the whole. Creating their own reality.
For those of us who work with families fractured by alienation, this biological discovery illuminates something we've long observed but struggled to articulate.
The Parent Who Becomes the Tumor
When a parent isolates a child from the other parent and the broader family network (physically, emotionally, or psychologically), something parallel to cancer begins.
The alienating parent serves as what psychiatry calls the "inducer" or "primary" in folie à deux, or shared psychotic disorder. Research published in the NCBI StatPearls database describes the mechanism:
"The inducer (primary) who has a psychotic disorder with delusions influences another nonpsychotic individual or more (induced, secondary) based on a delusional belief... Social isolation is essential. A confused individual can undergo influence under frightening conditions in the absence of social comparison."
More than 90% of shared psychotic disorder cases occur within families, with parent-child dyads being the most common (Bhutani et al., 2021). The child, like Levin's disconnected cell, loses access to the "electrical network" of relationships, perspectives, and reality-checks that would otherwise keep them oriented to the broader truth.
Relational Frame Theory: How Language Creates the Isolation
From a behavior-analytic perspective, Relational Frame Theory (RFT) provides the mechanism for how this disconnection is established and maintained.
RFT explains that humans don't just respond to events directly. We respond to events in relation to other events, and these relations are established through language and context. This is the foundation of human cognition, abstraction, and suffering.
When an alienating parent systematically provides a verbal context where the other parent is framed as dangerous, unloving, or abandoning; where the child's memories of good times are reframed as manipulation or exceptions; and where contact with the extended family network is framed as threatening or disloyal, the child's relational frames begin to derive entirely from that isolated context. The child is no longer responding to their actual experience with the targeted parent. They are responding to language-mediated derivations that exist only within the bubble created by the alienating parent.
This process is what Coyne and Wilson (2004) describe as cognitive fusion in impaired parenting. The parent's rigid, inflexible verbal constructions become the child's reality. The child fuses with these constructions, treating them as literal truth rather than one perspective among many.
The Two-Cell Cancer Parallel
What struck me about Levin's description was this:
"When individual cells disconnect from that electrical network, their cognitive boundary shrinks back down to their ancient tiny unicellular self. As far as that individual cell is concerned, the rest of the body is just outside environment. We're back to being a unicellular organism. The rest of the body is just environment."
In family alienation, the alienating parent and the alienated child form a dyad that disconnects from the larger relational network.
| Cancer Process | Alienation Process | |----------------|-------------------| | Cell disconnects from electrical network of body | Child disconnects from relational network of family | | Cell's "cognitive boundary" shrinks | Child's perspective narrows to single parent's reality | | Cell treats rest of body as "just environment" | Child treats targeted parent as threat or stranger | | Cell pursues unicellular goals (proliferate, consume) | Dyad pursues fusion goals (loyalty, alliance, us vs. them) | | Only takes 2 cells to begin cancer | Only takes 2 people to begin shared psychosis |
Levin's discovery at the cellular level, that disconnection from the larger network causes the unit to "go rogue" and pursue selfish rather than collective goals, is precisely what we observe in alienation dynamics.
The Alternative Reality That Doesn't Connect
Perhaps the most devastating aspect of alienation is the construction of what we might call a closed relational context, an alternative reality that actively resists connection with the outside world.
Research on shared psychotic disorder consistently identifies these conditions (NCBI StatPearls, 2023):
- Social isolation: "Most reported cases indicate poor interaction with society"
- Communication difficulties: "Having difficulty sharing ideas can be a reason for preferring isolation"
- Submissive secondary: "The role of the primary is rigid and possessing (dominant) while the submissive is less intelligent, passive, less resilient to suggestions, isolated"
The alienating parent creates an alternative reality, a delusional frame, and the child, lacking access to competing perspectives (the "electrical network" of broader relationships), derives this frame as truth.
Baker's (2007) research with adults who experienced parental alienation as children found that alienating parents used tactics remarkably similar to those of cult leaders. These tactics included requiring excessive devotion, using emotional manipulation to reinforce dependency, denigrating outside influences like the targeted parent, creating impressions of danger, deceiving about others' feelings, withdrawing love as punishment, and erasing memories of the targeted parent.
This isn't metaphorical. These are documented tactics that function identically to the recruitment and maintenance processes observed in cultic groups. The child becomes psychologically encapsulated, like a cancerous cell that no longer receives signals from the body it once belonged to.
Psychological Flexibility as the Antidote
If cognitive fusion, the literal belief in language-mediated reality constructions, is the mechanism of entrapment, then psychological flexibility is the mechanism of liberation.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), grounded in RFT, offers a framework for understanding and treating the aftermath of alienation:
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Defusion: Learning to observe thoughts as thoughts, not literal truths. The alienated child or recovering adult can learn to think "I notice I'm having the thought that my father abandoned me" rather than "My father abandoned me as fact."
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Acceptance: Making room for the painful emotions associated with recognizing manipulation, grief, and loss, without avoidance.
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Present moment awareness: Returning attention to direct experience rather than derived verbal constructions about the past.
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Values clarification: Reconnecting with what matters, independent of the alienating parent's imposed value system.
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Committed action: Taking steps toward building genuine relationships, even when the old verbal rules say this is dangerous.
Reconnection, Not Destruction
Here's the most hopeful part of Levin's cancer research:
"When that happens, you don't have to kill the cells. You don't have to use toxic chemotherapy. What you can do in many cases is simply force the cell to reconnect electrically to reconnect to its neighbors to acquire the proper bioelectric state and then it goes on as part of the group."
The cell isn't inherently evil. It isn't defective beyond repair. It simply lost connection to the larger network that oriented it to collective goals.
This is precisely the clinical reality we observe in alienation recovery. The alienated child, even as an adult, isn't broken. They weren't "turned evil" by the alienating parent. They simply lost access to the relational network that would have provided competing perspectives, memories, and connections.
Recovery doesn't require destroying the alienating parent's influence through counter-propaganda. It requires reconnection by reestablishing access to the broader network of relationships, perspectives, and direct experiences that the child was cut off from.
Implications for Practitioners
For professionals working with alienated families, this framework suggests several priorities:
1. Assess for isolation. How comprehensively has the child been disconnected from the targeted parent, extended family, and pre-existing relationships? The degree of isolation predicts the severity of entrenchment.
2. Facilitate safe reconnection rather than argumentation. The goal isn't to convince the child that their beliefs are wrong. It's to provide opportunities for direct experience that compete with derived constructions.
3. Address cognitive fusion. Help the child (or recovering adult) develop awareness of thoughts as thoughts, which are contextually derived constructions rather than literal representations of reality.
4. Build psychological flexibility. Support the development of defusion, acceptance, and values-based action that allows movement beyond the closed system.
5. Understand the timeline. Just as cancer that develops over years requires sustained treatment, alienation that develops over years requires patient, persistent reconnection work.
Conclusion: The Body Keeps the Score, and So Does the Family
Dr. Levin's research reminds us that intelligence and goal-directed behavior exist at every level of biological organization, from single cells to human consciousness. And at every level, disconnection from the larger network creates pathology.
The cell that disconnects becomes cancer. The person who disconnects becomes symptomatic. The family that fragments creates conditions for shared psychosis.
But the inverse is equally true: reconnection heals.
This healing does not come through force or through toxic interventions that try to "kill" the pathological patterns. It comes through patient, persistent work to restore the electrical connections, the relational connections, that allow the system to function as an integrated whole.
For alienated children and the families who love them, this biological metaphor offers both warning and hope. The warning is that isolation is the mechanism of entrenchment, and it only takes two people to create a closed system that resists reality. The hope is that the system can be restored, and the person inside isn't lost, they're waiting to be reconnected.
References
Baker, A. J. L. (2007). Adult children of parental alienation syndrome: Breaking the ties that bind. W.W. Norton & Company.
Bhutani, S., et al. (2021). Folie a deux: Shared psychotic disorder in a medical unit. Case Reports in Psychiatry. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8487833/
Coyne, L. W., & Wilson, K. G. (2004). The role of cognitive fusion in impaired parenting: An RFT analysis. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 4(3), 469-486.
Haines, J., Matthewson, M., & Turnbull, M. (2020). Understanding and managing parental alienation: A guide to assessment and intervention. Routledge.
Levin, M. (2026). Interview on bioelectricity, cancer, and regeneration. The Breakdown Podcast. https://youtu.be/U87rf4tasZY
Matthewson, M., & Bentley, C. (2022). The impact of parental alienating behaviours on the mental health of adults alienated in childhood. Children, 9(4), 475. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9026878/
NCBI StatPearls. (2023). Shared psychotic disorder. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541211/
Shimizu, M., et al. (2007). Folie à deux and shared psychotic disorder. Current Psychiatry Reports, 9(3), 200-205.